LENR Poses a Challenge and a Problem for Big Science

Low Energy Nuclear Reaction or cold fusion poses a huge problem for what we might call Big Science. Big Science is large-scale institutionalized research funded by governments and carried out through large institutions such as universities. Big Science consumes vast amounts of money yet in recent decades it seems to have produced nothing but rationale for more taxpayer funding.

The problem with Big Science is that it is controlled by a small cadre of researchers and academics. These people are not the most brilliant or capable individuals instead they are usually the best at academic and institutional politics. They are those who know how to work the system to get what they want rather than researchers or thinkers. Their skills include knowing how to lose at golf to the university president and how to kiss up to whatever politician is in office this week.

These people serve as gatekeepers that decide what science receives funding and what science does not. They have effectively shut LENR out of mainstream research because it does not fit their world view. Part of the reason for this is that LENR is a fairly small kind of research that does not require big funding. One of the worst aspects about Big Science is that it concentrates on those areas of research that bring in the most grant money. IE they concentrate on hot fusion because they can receive more dollars for it.

Big Science particularly in the arena of physics seems to be a miserable failure. Seventy years of big scientific research in the field since the end of World War II have yielded nuclear reactors that aren’t much better than those used in the 1950s. Giant nuclear power plants like that at Fukushimause about the same level of technology as a tube television set. The old cassette recorder you pitched in the dumpster a few years ago employed far more advanced technology than today’s nuclear reactors.

In a recent op-ed piece in the Foreign Policy Journal Canadian physicist Dr. Stoyan Sarg (a veteran of Big Science at NASA and elsewhere) states that science is stagnated. He notes no major discoveries have been made in the field of physics in decades despite the publication of lots of interesting and exciting research.

Sarg blames the scientific establishment with its bureaucratic style of management for this stagnation. In particular he accuses them of deliberately misinforming decision makers in an effort to protect their income streams.

Sarg also does a good job of laying out how the scientific elite uses its’ control over peer reviewed journals to determine what is and what is not mainstream science. He uses Cold Fusion a prime example of a promising area of research that was essentially shut out of mainstream science by this process. Persons that write what the mainstream scientists want get published those that write something else don’t get published even if it has scientific merit.

Persons who cannot get published cannot receive research funds or good paying jobs. They get no money for international conferences or collaboration. To make matters worse the scientific establishment uses debunking by misinformation to destroy anybody that tries to take an alternative to the mass media. He cites Pons and Fleischman as classic victims of such a smear campaign.

Sarg’s op-ed piece is well worth reading for everybody in light of the tactics used against LENR promoters including Andrea Rossi. He makes a good case that our civilization is facing challenges that can only be solved by new scientific and technological advances yet such breakthroughs are stymied by the scientific bureaucracy and its allies in the mass media.

There is some hope that Sarg fails to mention, first the scientific establishment at least in the US sees that the federal gravy train of big grant money that has been pouring out since World War II is about to end. So they’re taking a look at smaller more visionary science that might attract a few dollars from private donors. This includes LENR which has recently received attention from both MIT and the University of Missouri.

Second many physicists and researchers fed up with big science’s restrictions have moved into the private sector. There some of them have been able to do the research organized science tried to suppress and are coming up with breakthroughs. Almost all the LENR breakthroughs in recent years have come from private labs or workshops not Big Science’s institutions.

Big Science’s days are numbered. Taxpayers and politicians are sick and tired of paying for it and many scientists are openly revolting against it. More importantly private researchers are doing what Big Science has failed to do solving our civilization’s critical problems.

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8 Responses to LENR Poses a Challenge and a Problem for Big Science

I hope that the Nobel Prize committee is following this story and has the good sense to award Martin Fleischman foor what he has *already* done in this field. He and Pons took the hits. They were right. That is clearly true, even if Rosi and Defkalion — which I am not predicting — flop.

Yes, I confirmed that the problem with that Facebook like and Twitter tweet bar is that it assumes that your screen resolution will be higher than just about any smart-phone allows. I recommend that you embed that bar directly into the html page, rather than using the fixed div which assumes how big the screen will be. =D

I don’t know if this helps, but I have been doing a lot of LENR activism, and sent a LENR primer to Israel, and somehow a scientist in the US got it and replied. We exchanged a few emails, and I remembered it was satisfying at the time because I thought somebody with credentials finally “got it.” Finally, I asked the man what he thought of LENR, and he complete backed away from LENR and said that he only endorsed hot fusion.

Never explain with maliciousness what you can explain by simple stupidity. Ossification and orthodoxy runs deep the higher you go in the hierarchy.

Big Science here means unclassified science. It is likely that covert military research is alive and well. For example, over the last 50 years or so, there seems to have been very little published research aimed at understanding and engineering gravity. Such research seems to have gone underground following demonstration of the Biefeld-Brown effect to the US military in 1953.

Another likely outcome of covert research are the balls of light that many people have seen in the skies the world over. A case can be made that these are evidence of ongoing research on a physics related to Tesla’s work which has also been suppressed. Such a physics has obvious military applications, but it could also help to ameliorate many other problems in society.

If you were a military planner with hands on exciting new technology that can be made into weapons, the first instinct would be to protect it and prevent anyone else from following the same development path. Big Science funding constraints would be an effective way to limit novel research in the public domain.

Maybe. One problem with your thinking is that military planners are interested in much more than weapons. Some of them are interested in money, others in energy and other problems. My guess is if the technology you suggested really existed some military man would have sold it to a big company for big bucks long ago and those flying saucers would be sitting at your local airport with names like Southwest Air painted on them.

I have no doubt that Big Science is corrupt and suppresses anything that might disrupt its gravy train, including LENR. That being said, Rossi has acted VERY suspiciously, doing everything within his power to AVOID an unbiased validation test of his ecat. With the levels of excess heat that he claims, an incontrovertible validation test can be designed and run by a college engineering senior with a B average at any good university. It isn’t rocket science. His suspicious behavior, and increasingly more ambitious claims (robotization, UL approval, 15 MW unit etc…), without ever proving his original claims, lead me to believe that he is running a scam. It pains me to say this, because I was an enthusiastic fan 6 months ago, but enough is enough.

I agree with you Bruno. Rossi needs to prove his claims with a test or bring out a working device. If doesn’t soon he lose all of his supporters and good will. Rossi will have to submit to such a test sooner or later if he wants to be taken seriously and get financing for his device. I wonder if such a test has been conducted but Rossi is keeping its results secret for some reason.